Matt, Bob Cowan, JBCobra and anyone else interested -
Here is a partial quote from an FAQ written by Arron Johnson of BadAss Engines. This guy for years has built race engines for a living I'll also supply the link for the entire article. Hope you find it interesting.
What drives the oil pump? The distributor gear does. Chevy's use a much larger gear than a Ford does, in fact, it's about twice the size, which means it's about twice as strong. The distributor gear is what takes the load of spinning the oil pump. The more volume you pump through an engine, the more load gets put on that gear. Ford gears tend to get eaten-up because they just aren't big or strong enough to take the load that a high volume pump puts on it. Once you eat-up a distributor gear it is pretty much disaster for the cam gear as well. If you wipe either one out, count on having to replace the cam shaft! This doesn't even get into all of that metal going through the engine, which doesn't help things like bearings. We tend to use stock oil pumps on Ford's and high volume pumps on "performance" Chevy's.
Full Link: http://www.badasscars.com/index.cfm/page/ptype=product/product_id=91/category_id=13/home_id=3/mode=prod/prd91.htm